In this blog, Maggie McGuigan (Series Editor and author of Read in to Writing), explains why studying a whole book is key to raising attainment in English and achieving that all important 'greater depth'.

If children are taught how to give feedback on their learning, it means that teachers can be better equipped to help them make greater progress. Use this lesson plan to encourage children to reflect on what they say about their learning and how this can help the teacher to support them.

It has taken a lot of hours for Ofsted to discover that the primary curriculum is skewed by SATs, that the foundation subjects are being squeezed and creative teaching is not as widespread as they hoped. They find that timetabling is conservative, priorities are focused on the acquisition of knowledge and there is a lack of flair in some of the teaching. And, apparently, we don’t know what we mean when we say ‘skills’.

Up and down the country in 1000’s of schools there are improvement plans with some variation of the phrase ‘raise boys’ achievement.’ For most schools this is a yearly target because year on year the difference between boys’ and girls’ attainment either continues to grow or remains stagnant. Very rarely does this gap close.

You may have heard of the “word gap” it refers to the gap of 30 million words between different groups of children before the age of 3. Charlotte Raby (author of Rising Stars Vocabulary) explores the meaning of the 'word gap' and explains how your school can tackle the problem.